Ugh, what a week. My brain is so crowded with things to be irate about I don’t even know where to start, but I’ll go with waking up Wednesday to learn that Governor Ducey had appointed Goldwater Institute litigator Clint Bolick to the state’s Supreme Court. Bolick has no experience as a judge but a long history of attacking public education and public workers, as detailed in the Montini column sneered at by Ducey’s communications director. And, hoo boy, does Bolick take a dim view of workers’ rights in general!

It was especially unnerving to see the announcement of Bolick’s appointment the day after the legislative district meeting I attended Tuesday night, wherein we were told that Democrats were duty-bound to support Ducey’s state land trust grab, AKA Prop 123, because we don’t want to be seen as “anti-education”. This is obviously not a concern for Governor Ducey, who strongly broadcast his contempt for the education groups who signed on in support of Prop 123 with this Supreme Court pick. ...

EJ Montini at The Republic (azcentral.com) takes a few chomps out of Il Duce's you know what.

Gov. Doug Ducey has decided that the newest member of the Arizona Supreme Court will be the conservative Goldwater Institute, the even more conservative American Legislative Exchange Council and the right-wing billionaire out-of-state brothers, Charles and David Koch.

Wait…didn’t the press release from the governor’s office say that he named as the latest Supreme Court judge an attorney named Clint Bolick?

Yeah.

Same thing.

[snip]

And if you look at Bolick’s record over the years you learn that he and the institution he has run have worked very hard to cut the benefits and/or funding from cops and firefighters, poor people and public school children.

Now he is Gov. Ducey’s first appointment to the Supreme Court of Arizona.

I guess this tells us a little bit about the people Ducey cares about as well.

[snip]

Still, Bolick has all the academic and professional credentials to be named to the Arizona Supreme Court.

Gov. Doug Ducey was well within his right to appoint him.

The governor obviously likes and admires the man.

As for poor people and police officers and firefighters and public schools children, well…

Arizona does not elect its judges to the state Supreme Court or Court of Appeals. More than 30 years ago the voters approved a constitutional amendment, spearheaded by Sandra Day O’Connor, to institute a system of merit selection of judges.

But for the past decade or so, far-right political organizations in Arizona, such as the Center for Arizona Policy, have sought to weaken or to reverse the merit selection of judges to make it easier to appoint conservative activist judges to the court who will be political on the bench ...

Arizona’s merit selection of judges offers only a thin veneer of protection against the political corruption of the judiciary that occurred in Wisconsin. The final selection still rests with the governor, so it depends on the ethics of the governor. Yeah, good luck with that.

Following the Blue Meanie following the money is a good place to wind this up.

Governor Doug Ducey, the ice cream man hired by Koch Industries to run their Southwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Arizona, has now given the “Kochtopus” political payback for all that “dark money” their bag man Sean Noble funneled into his race to get him elected governor. The “Kochtopus” now has a seat on the Arizona Supreme Court.